The Truth About the Arab Street

Do Friendlier Policies Mean Friendlier Ties?

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MARC LYNCH is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. Follow him on Twitter @abuaardvark.

Amaney Jamal is a careful scholar, and her book has advanced the discussion about the drivers of Arab views of the United States in important ways. But her response to my review of it misses my major critiques and raises new questions about how to interpret her evidence.

Jamal insists that her data prove the existence of pro-American views among Arab publics before the Arab Spring and that such attitudes were more frequent among the aspirational middle class, which received economic benefits from the U.S.-backed status quo. This is true, as far as it goes, but is also unsurprising. No opinion surveys in the years before the Arab Spring, even in the darkest days of the George W. Bush administration, showed 100 percent hostility toward the United States. It stands to reason that the strongest bastions of pro-American attitudes would overlap with the better-off sectors of society.

But the implications of that finding are not what Jamal seems to believe. Those middle-class constituencies approved of the United States in spite of all the unpopular policies that Jamal would like to see changed. In fact, the patterns that she uncovered suggest that as long as the relationship makes economic sense for them, the Arab “haves” will continue to support the United States regardless of what it does elsewhere. Similarly, the Obama administration’s decision to support democratic change in some Arab countries, however tepidly, actually seems to have hurt the United States’ image with those previously supportive groups. What is more, Barack Obama’s policy does not seem to have won any new support among those Arabs who were previously hostile to the United States. Indeed, Jamal’s detailed, empirically driven analysis makes all the more glaring the complete absence of hard evidence that any U.S. policy shifts in the direction of Arab popular preferences have changed Arab views of the United States for the better.

Jamal contends that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s avoidance of extreme anti-Americanism after its

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